The Camera Killer Read Online Free PDF

all hell would break loose.
    What did she mean? inquired my partner.
    Heinrich called for silence; the president was coming. Sure enough, the federal president was shown delivering a brief address. The occupants of the living room accompanied it with tokens of disapproval and offensive remarks about the head of state. While a majority of those present were still accusing him of being a disagreeable individual, the studio called its correspondent in West Styria.
    The nature of the situation there hadn’t changed. The local correspondent, looking down on the crowded main square, commented on this as follows: “Public sentiment is at boiling point.” She reported that the bishop of the Graz-Seckau diocese had gone to see the bereaved family an hour earlier. Scheduled for 11:30,doubtless as a mark of disapproval aimed at the abhorrent video transmission, was a memorial service that senior ecclesiastical dignitaries and members of the government were expected to attend.
    Meantime, some eight thousand to ten thousand people had converged on a town whose population normally numbered only eight hundred. There was a never-ending stream of cars and buses, camera crews, journalists, and garden-variety rubbernecks. The parish priest, who spoke last, said that God had shut his eyes to them.
    Back in the studio, the woman presenter announced some program changes occasioned by current events. At 8:15, there would be a live report from the hard-hit West Styrian town. Thereafter, at around 9:00 p.m., a program on the psyche of murderers first transmitted nine months earlier, and at 10:00 p.m., the Easter Vigil service from St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.
    Finally, the commentary turned to the killer. He was around six feet and had dark hair and dark eyes. You bet some viewers will now be shouting that he’s a foreigner, said Heinrich.
    The presenter: According to the testimony of the boy who escaped, he was roughly thirty years old. However, she went on, experts considered this information unreliable because children possess only a limited ability to estimate an adult’s age. Ergo, the man might equally be twenty or forty-five. Two different forensic sketches were shown again. One had been based on the testimony of the surviving child, the other on that of a farmhand who claimed to have spotted a man near the murder scene.
    Heinrich said they were as alike as Michael Jackson and Oliver Hardy.
    The presenter: The trail wasn’t red-hot, but there were some promising leads; that was all that had filtered through the Ministry of the Interior’s news blackout.
    A new picture appeared beside her. It showed a cordoned-off clearing in the forest, together with some policemen in uniform or scene-of-crime vests. A timetable was inserted. The presenter reported that, on the morning of the day of the murders, an unknown man had captured three children in a forest near the small West Styrian town of Frauenkirchen. In the course of several hours, during which he interviewed them in front of a video camera, two terrible crimes occurred, in addition to the torching of a hay barn. By means of threats and appalling psychological intimidation, the man had induced two of the three boys to throw themselves off tall trees, as a result of which both had died. The third had managed to escape in an unusual manner.
    Having questioned him long and exhaustively about his emotional response to the death of his brothers, the killer had offered him a choice. He himself would shut his eyes and count up to a hundred. The boy was at liberty to run away during that time. If he decided to escape, the man would pursue him and, if he caught him, kill him in an extremely brutal fashion, ripping out his nails and flaying him alive, etc. If he failed to catch him, he would turn up on a certain day in the fall and exterminate the boy’s entire family, him included. If the boy decided to stay, on the other hand, the man promised him a quick and painless death and his